downforacross / downforacross.com Goto Github PK

If someone uploads a puzzle that is already in the database, don't create multiple copies of it clogging up the home page.

List of emojis that may or may not be freely available:

• "default emojis" (https://github.com/iamcal/js-emoji)
• more builtin emojiPacks, we can use this repo emoji-data (table view of all emojis)
• party parrot (important enough to merit its own issue #40 b633fd0)
• bun
• pusheen
• jokukuma (af51611)
• sugar cubs (04be484)
• prickly pear (-partially done- done ce35f29)
• slack emojis (if free)

Comment in this thread with suggestions and I'll add them to the checklist!

Hi! Thanks for your work on this project.

In the past 1-2 days, the client has started to lose sync very frequently (every ~30 seconds). When it happens, the client stops receiving updates. The "Ahead" count at the bottom continues to increment for every local action.

It's fixed by refreshing the client.

Let the users put emojis in cells as reactions.
Mobile interface is very clear: if they type an emoji, then append it to the emoji list
Keep emojis around for ~5 minutes, take the last 1 from each user, last 3 globally, to avoid clutter.

Launch this behind a flag?

This should be an easy one!

Current state of the world:

(type :parrot in a chat bar)

Desired state of the world:

Tutorial:

1. Grab the list of parrots. One way to do this is by scraping it from https://cultofthepartyparrot.com/
2. Edit this file, which currently only contains the data for one parrot 😢: https://github.com/downforacross/downforacross.com/blob/master/src/lib/emojiPacks/partyParrot.js
3. Make sure the parrots all load correctly & are sized properly

Cluelist

• new york times-like view of clue list in a scrollview (hiding the actual grid)

MobileGridControlsV2

Because the onscreen keyboard (in both android and iOS) comes with nasty things like autocomplete, useless headers, and unnecessary height on each key, we should make our own keyboard in react!

App-ness

These are a good set of guidelines that should be followed: https://web.archive.org/web/20151103001838/http://www.luster.io/blog/9-29-14-mobile-web-checklist.html

Important ones:

• position: fixed / no overscrolling
• fixed layout (toolbar, grid, )
• no contextmenu / long tap / selection
• disable zooming on the page, but allow grid to be zoomed in?
• native app-like multi-modal view w/ transitions (e.g. when navigating between home page, game, and within game, grid, chat, cluelist)

• use a better palette
• avoid collisions

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/daily/2013/06/17 has notes.
i think we already extract it from the puz file at upload-time. so it's a matter of rendering it in the game page

• Clicking the pencil shouldn't take focus away from whichever square you were on
• There should be a keyboard shortcut for pencil mode

Starting point: see #83

The yellow bar that pops up is non-responsive (doesn't disappear after enter or esc), only goes away after a space or after the 'emoji' is deleted.

• color the username with color of sender (to match with in-game cursor)

I'd like to be able to link friends to a URL they can open and it will spawn a game, without having to create the game individually for each one.

Should be pretty doable without significant architecture changes

Checklist

• frontend renders them
• backend supports storing them
• export to puz includes them
• export to dfac puzzle includes it

I'd like a page, downforacross.com/replays/puzzleid, where I can see a list of plays of my puzzle that have happened. When I click a link from that list, it goes to a replay page (group, or solo) for that solve.

In order for this to happen, replay pages for solo solves would have to exist.

• within the same game, e.g. when refreshing, keep the same username [only if user has chatted with that username at least once?]
  • can use localstorage for this
  • alternatively, to make this persist across browsers, use /user/history/:gid [should be easy to throw lastUsedUsername as a param to User.joinGame, and maybe make something like User.listUserHistory that takes a gid as a param]
• retain the old functionality of generating a new username for each game, because i think people like being different animals.

the keyboard shortcuts are a bit non-standard.

Grid:

• . flip black/white
• Enter: Switch focus to Cluetext
• Esc: Switch focus to Chat

Chat:

• Enter [when there is no text] / Esc: switch focus to grid

ClueText:

• Enter: Switch focus to Grid
• Esc: Switch focus to Grid

We should have this information available in the composition page (perhaps an icon that expands into a modal).

apparently some of the messenger.com links expired rip. should just host in public/static

the Hints component is out of date and uses a very small, unscored wordlist. to change this:

• support user-uploading scored wordlists (cache these client-side but not in db b.c. copyright)
• add a default (can be very shitty, for now) scored wordlist (e.g., we can assign random or uniform scores to all the words in the current wordlist)
• rewrite the algorithm for ranking partially filled grids to use scored entries
• add an algorithm to auto-fill-grid
  • should be aware of the no-repeated-words rule

GUI:

• support double-clicking suggested entries to fill (in pencil)
• make auto-fill-grid be in pencil?
• clear all pencil / commit all pencil buttons [do other tools have this?]
• highlight in red all problem entries, i.e. those that are incomplete and have no suitable matches/are too long (crossfire has this, i think)

might require some fiddling to get css / keyboard shortcuts right.

For example, if I want to find NYT Crosswords from April 2020, my intuition is to type NY Times April 2020 into the search bar. This doesn't work because downforacross is searching for that entire string in each title, and not finding it because it doesn't exist within a string like NY Times, Monday, April 27, 2020. But it's a very common technique to split each token in the search term, and return an result that contains NY, Times, April, and 2020. I believe this would be more powerful and intuitive.

Add movement options, i.e., allow customization of arrow key behavior.
NYT's thing:

Currently, this is what it looks like:

Some nice to haves:

• cut out paused-time (e.g. https://downforacross.com/beta/replay/12712 has a cursor-move a few hours after the game is over)
• play/pause button w/ speed control
• progress bar. i guess we could have a "fine-scrubbing" bar like the current one (zoomed-in), and a "coarse-scrubbing" bar that corresponds to the traditional media player thing (zoomed-out).
• better mouse controls, e.g. hover-preview (like youtube)?

Game pre- #83 had a different user model / event schema.

The chat component should render the chatMessage.sender field conditionally on whether or not a displayName exists.

👍 from :thumbsup: for example

Progress Update:

• convert emojis in chatbar
• add some autocomplete suggestions when typing

It would be cool to see a list of people currently in the room and the ability to hover over the colored cursors and see who it is

Ideally when navigating away from the tab, but if you close out of the puzzle window right now, the timer just runs forever and will still be running when returning to the url. Would be nice to be able to take a break and reflect actual time spent on the puzzle.

I'd love to have a dark mode option.

interestingly, the clue text doesn't actually expand. this is probably a browser-specific thing

Currently, https://downforacross.com/replays loads all games in their entirety. each downloaded game object is ~20kB (but i think beta games will be bigger).

Only the metadata of the game is required, i.e. no grid/cursor tracking needs to be part of the query.

• clock events for beta games will need to be explicitly queried from the events list, to reconstruct the play-time
• chat events too^

Two people working on this puzzle
Used check function a few times
All squares are blue, timer is still running and highlight is still blue

Sometimes when multiple participants type an answer the cursor position shifts and skips around, though I've observed this when I'm the only person typing (on a shared game)

https://downforacross.com/game/3880 - this is the only time we've seen this

Otherwise clue will go out of view when you scroll too far down (especially when the keyboard comes up)

The Monday, April 20, 2020 NY Times (Lynn Lempel) puzzle crashes (immediately clears to a white screen) when clicking on 66 across (either via the clue or the grid).

generate new puzzle: https://downforacross.com/beta/play/5530
filled: https://downforacross.com/beta/game/448276-glemp

sometimes, people just want to delete the existing name & write their own.

possible fixes:

• replace the username with randomly generated one only if the username-input loses focus. could be good to do this at the same time as #36
• remove the re-generate feature entirely

downforacross.com/compose looks very plain.

ideas for the main compositions list (the fields available will depend on #27)

• last updated column
• collaborators?
• sort compositions by last updated
• published status + link to replays if published
  • incl. published at, version number, private or not

the rest of the page

• word list manager (this feature doesn't exist as part of dfac, and probably won't for a while)
• link to a tutorial / resources? e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/crosswords/how-to-make-a-crossword-puzzle.html, an article which itself contains a bunch of links to constructor resources

Would be great if delete was able to skip over correct characters in an incorrect word.

Currently, if you try to backspace through an answer that has a mixture of red and blue characters, it gets stuck on correct characters (you can backspace but nothing happens and it doesn't move on).

It's great that I can't delete blue characters, but if there are additional red characters in the word it'd be nice to be able to hop over the correct square and finish deleting.

E.g.

One solution to this is a "clear all incorrect" function, but I sometimes like to leave red squares as a cue to distracted collaborators :)

make replays (https://downforacross.com/replays) look prettier (show puzzle title, etc).
Note: puzzle-specific replays (/replays/pid) are only available to logged-in users, maybe we should show some sort of error message to non-logged in users that try to access it.

Checklist

• prettier table layout (thanks @daubaris!)
• show puzzle title in /replays (1c5ac4b)
• fix "start time / duration" for v1 games won't do

I uploaded a puzzle to downforacross.com by mistake (didn't realize it would be hosted publicly forever). Can it be deleted?

I'd like to be able to upload a puzzle and specify that it's a Thursday (for example) so people know how hard it is and what amount of nonsense to expect.

currently there's some weird behavior that can cause the text to not be saved.

quick fix: add a key prop, and use it to check if the content-editable div's text needs to be overwritten (i.e., it should happen when switching to a different clue, but not when switching from editing to not-editing).
long fix: make it support google-docs like collaboration (the above fix will make weird things happen, like two simultaneous clue-editors overwriting each others' work). this is probably not necessary functionality but it would be cool

Update: this is also really broken on firefox (cursor [aka selection] resets to position 0 whenever the element's textContent is set, because... the selection api is different on ff?)

I'm trying to set up the dev environment.

For the backend I ran the instructions detailed here: https://github.com/downforacross/downforacross.com/tree/master/server#getting-started. For the frontend I ran these commands: https://github.com/downforacross/downforacross.com#getting-started.

However, while both appear to be working, uploading a .puz file appears to do nothing, and I can't see it on the puzzle list. Any pointers?

only show games on which the timer has been started on the replay list

1. Use socket.io rooms https://socket.io/docs/server-api/#socket-join-room-callback
2. Add monitoring to better understand why connections are getting dropped
3. Scale the backend using something like elastic load balancer and kubernetes

these emojis are great (all gifs).

https://slackmojis.com/ --> search party_

show cursors of collaborators, like in games.
this will be trickier, because it matters (moreso) what direction the cursors are associated with.
it also may be nice to know, e.g., if your collaborator is editing a clue / the position within the clue.

Checklist

• grid cursors (0fe7989)
• grid cursor orientation
• cluetext cursors
  example composition page: https://downforacross.com/composition/263596

I have a .puz file that has the symbol © in the copyright line (as it should), but this is being rendered as "â©". For example: https://downforacross.com/beta/game/209928-splob.

Some quick googling suggests that you need to add a meta charset tag: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17493693/2148718.

something like <iframe src="www.downforacross.com/embed/:pid" .../>, should look like this, with a border around it.

• no need to support collaboration / chat
• should store state (can be in localStorage)
• possible design: behave like /play/:pid, i.e. use the user's list of games with of the current pid, and create one if none exists. Ideally, should defer creation of game until the user actually starts interacting with the puzzle, so that we don't create a new game every time anyone visits the page?

I'm noticing that there doesn't seem to be a way to answer with more than 1 letter in a slot for Rebus answers.

Am I missing something? Or is this an area that needs addressing?

I love this project! 😄

for unpublished compositions:

• a "Publish" button that generates a pid for the composition and stores it
  • should write to puzzle/:pid
  • should write to puzzlelist/:pid
  • should write to composition/cid/published (spec tbd)

for published compositions:

• an "Update" button that updates (in-place) the puzzle at the associated pid. (this will also update all ongoing beta games with, e.g., new clues)
• a button to "toggle private"
• a link to the replays/pid
• a (copy-able) link to /beta/play

@akshatb42 has WIP of this.